Love Your Enemies: How to Break the Anger Habit & Be a Whole Lot Happierby Sharon Salzberg and Robert ThurmanPosted by: DailyOM

When people and circumstances upset us, how do we deal with them? Often, we feel victimized. We become hurt, angry, and defensive. We end up seeing others as enemies, and when things don’t go our way, we become enemies to ourselves.

But what if we could move past this pain, anger, and defensiveness?

Inspired by Buddhist philosophy, this book introduces us to the four kinds of enemies we encounter in life: the outer enemy, people, institutions, and situations that mean to harm us; the inner enemy, anger, hatred, fear, and other destructive emotions; the secret enemy, self-obsession that isolates us from others; and the super-secret enemy, deep-seated self-loathing that prevents us from finding inner freedom and true happiness.

In this practical guide, we learn not only how to identify our enemies, but more important, how to transform our relationship to them. Love Your Enemies teaches us how to ...

-- break free from the mode of “us” versus “them” thinking
-- develop compassion, patience, and love
-- accept what is beyond our control
-- embrace lovingkindness, right speech, and other core concepts

Throughout, authors Sharon Salzberg and Robert Thurman share stories and exercises for achieving finding peace within yourself and with the world. Drawing from ancient spiritual wisdom and modern psychology, Love Your Enemies presents tools that are useful for all readers.

EXCERPT

We meet the outer enemy when we have been harmed. In everyday life, all sorts of harm can come to us. We—and our loved ones—may be insulted or abused, robbed or beaten, bullied or tormented, tortured or even killed. Our property may be taken, damaged, or destroyed. The people who commit such acts fit neatly into the normal definition of an enemy: a person who hates another and wishes or tries to injure him or her. We feel perfectly justified in labeling such perpetrators our enemies and treating them accordingly.

Other people, too, may be abused or harmed, and if we identify with them, we consider the people who harm them our enemies as well. We find no end of enemies in books and movies and TV shows, where the bad guys are doing bad things to the good guys. Naturally we identify with the good guys, and we wait in suspense for them to catch the bad guys and save the day.

Other outer enemies that cause us much pain are the many things we see going wrong in the world and the people we perceive as responsible for them: economic inequity that favors the super-rich over everyone else; industries that pollute our waterways and turn empty lots into Superfund sites; politicians who play fast and loose with our social entitlements and constitutional rights; well-financed interest groups that push their narrow agendas to the forefront. Everywhere we look, we can find some group antagonizing another group.

We need look no farther than our neighborhood or the local school to find enemies galore. Teenaged shooters and terrorists grab today’s headlines, but an even more insidious and widespread problem is bullying, which has reached epidemic proportions. Race, creed, nationality, social class, gender orientation—even a stutter or the “wrong” clothes can invite abuse and attacks, with sometimes fatal consequences.

We only have to open a newspaper or turn on the TV news to be confronted with enemies across the world. When we see one country attacking another or turning on its own people, we feel deeply upset by the carnage and want to see the aggressors defeated. When our own country is the aggressor—I think of the “shock-and-awe” bombing of Baghdad—we are torn between our desire to vanquish the bad guys and our sadness and guilt over the human suffering that results from resorting to violence.

We try to make ourselves invulnerable to harm, but merely shielding ourselves or running away from it is only a temporary fix. Sooner or later, harm will find us. The only sure way to make ourselves invulnerable is to change our view of enemies and learn to see every instance of harm as an opportunity—as something we can use to benefit ourselves and others. From this perspective, how could we possibly grow in strength and burnish the shining armor of patience without having someone or something attempt to harm us, to give us a chance to learn to restrain our reactions of irritation, victimization, anger, and fear? We need enemies for this. We should be grateful for our enemies, the Dalai Lama has said, for they teach us patience, courage, and determination, and help us develop a tranquil mind.

To deal effectively with our enemies, we have to overcome our hatred and fear of those who harm us, intend to harm us, have harmed us in the past, or might harm us in the future. That’s a tall order for most of us, at least at first. Coming to terms with our enemies is best taken slowly, in incremental steps.

Right away, let me assure you that we are not suggesting you simply lie down and let whoever wants to harm you take a shot. That would be masochistic, serving no one. To deal with our enemies, we can start by doing everything possible to avoid the people who wish us harm, in order to keep them from being in a position to carry out their hurtful plans. If we can’t avoid them, however, we do then need to defend ourselves. But between avoidance and defensiveness lies a middle way. The best strategy of all is to act preemptively, skillfully, before we are angry, and not allow our enemies the opportunity to harm us.

Excerpted from Love Your Enemies: How to Break the Anger Habit & Be a Whole Lot Happier by Sharon Salzberg and Robert Thurman. It is published by Hay House and available at all bookstores or online at: www.hayhouse.com